some photos of the fashion show are online, but they are from matt carroll’s camera loaned to nik perry, and they are of that style of early digital photography in which the picture is taken one second after the button is pressed so the scenes are all captured one second after they were interesting / well composed. i think clean anderson got some good snaps too, just got to get them from him.

ok, fessing: for a month or so now i’ve had a cell phone. i don’t need to defend myself– it will suffice to say that rules for things always change. i have been navigating the new parameters, implications, courtesies, and manners. some points:

i set my ring tone to the sound of me whistling, which i think is really smart because when it goes off it isn’t as distracting as a cell phone, it is as distracting as a person whistling. lots of times people say they just thought it was me whistling for no reason (which happens).

the phone (which is the cheap nokia phone) comes loaded with a lot of tiny applications and games. i don’t care about the games, but the weirdest one is a coin flipping application, which displays a penny on the screen, and at the touch of a button the penny flips away and then back (as if the screen were a window looking at the penny from above), to display either heads or tails.

i use the alarm clock and the countdown timer on the phone constantly. if i’m sitting around being lazy, i’ll set the countdown timer for 3 minutes, then when it goes off i’ll get up and be productive. this probably sounds pretty dumb but it works out well for me.

i’m getting used to not having to say my name when i call someone. indeed, i’ve started answering the phone with “hi [name displayed]“.

“Mobile phones communicate continuously with cellular towers in order to receive calls, sending out a signal registering its existence and identity with the provider’s nearest towers. The provider stores this cell-site data, which can be triangulated to determine the customer’s physical location. [...] A new decision last week out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts holds that law enforcement need show only “relevance to an ongoing investigation” to get a historical record of your past movement.” –article

james amoeba sent me the picture he drew that inadvertantly had me in it. detail is above. here is the whole. here is jean coz talking about it. james is a super nice guy and his webpages look awesome. hi james!

this morning matt coe woke me up to go hang out in front of 7-11, where we sat around talking about rasputin, christopher lee’s furious eyes, and vincent price’s gustatory horror (i recently bought a vincent price action figure). when i got home marge was watching “rasputin: the mad monk” so i tucked in.

the problem with this movie is twofold. first, rasputin is merely poisoned, then thrown out of a window. wha? the death is the best part: poisoned, shot, shot more, drowned.

the second problem is one that a lot of movies have nowadays, that maybe i’m the only one to notice– they don’t star nick curtin. don’t worry– me and matt carroll are working on this. nick curtin, check your inbox.

the fashion show the other day was really awesome, clean anderson took a mess of pictures so hopefully i’ll get those soon to share. it was really frantic but everything pretty much worked out great. there were maybe 30 outifts, 10 models, and 15 designers. me and sheryl ann MCed, fashion model party house music was playing, there was a stage, fans were blowing, some boobs popped out of things, some nuts hung low, it ruled. pictures up when pictures got.

mike t has the excellent skill of calling in the late morning right at the point after i have woken up but while i’m still lying in bed. perfect. as it turns, we are not going to miami this week after all, but maybe the first week of october? which works out good because now i can figure out how to make next month’s rent at the store.

yesterday (speaking of the store) we had a last-minute art opening for the brattleboro squad. ok, it was last minute only in that i tried to put it off for two weeks so i could do more promotion but then my last-minute message wasn’t got and what am i going to do, send abby banks home? she’s a delight unto all! it was super fun hanging out all day, and the brattleboro crew came by (sorry, no new king tuff cds everyone!), and a few worcesters managed to make it out, we ate pizza, it was tite. the show is really good, and will be up for three weeks- psychedelia and gross stuff– animals with legs that aren’t right and people pooping on their own faces. abby has a book coming out of pictures of punk houses, which includes the go go. we talked a lot about man is the bastard, who are from the town she is from.

right now i am eating pizzeria-flavor combos and drinking “rola cola” (99cent six-packs at duffy’s). i am making myself a little sick, but in the words of the poet (johnny houston), soda is good– i have one. the combos don’t taste like pizza, but they are reminiscent of a pizzaria somehow. yesterday i told sam boyd that pizza only exists in the future– that every time you talk about pizza you are talking about the pizza you have yet to eat, and even if you’re talking about how you ate too much pizza, you’re talking about the pizza you are unable to eat. rather than being the tortoise and achilles all over again, i feel inspired by this idea of an always-attainable goal, and i still think of every time i ever ate pizza as the same moment with a cast of thousands refracted in an infinite jewel. anyway, eating the combos isn’t this moment, but it’s a hair’s breadth away in a cloudier, oddly-cut jewel that can only be observed in the past, when you’re asking yourself “why does my tummy hurt?”.

still tons of shit to do before this fashion show, which i’m co-MCing with sheryl-ann, and i have some outfits in. two of the three outfits have spleen protection. ok, shit, gotta boogie.

ok, here’s the email from k-prizzy:

The future is now, the fashion is here: This Friday, Worcester’s own fashion renegades show their stuff at Fashion SHOCK– Worcester’s premiere venue for the tragically rad and unquestionably awesome.

Firehouse
8pm
Friday the 21st

pre-show bake sale

First Act: Matt Carroll’s “A Servant Of His Majesties Royal Navy Reads Excerpts From ‘My Secret Life’ By Anonymous” Worcester debut
Second Act: Fashion Catwalk Promenade
Conclusion: Karaoke party!

All submissions for the show are due to me by Thursday night, midnight.

Our friends look good, and they’re gonna show us how it’s done. Dress up in your own favorite threads– the fancier/crazier the better! This is going to be a night to remember.

l-u-v,
pars

see you rad racks there.

i’ve been trying to revamp the store, build some new stuff, change things around, make it less intimidating, and, you know, more information and more in formation.

tiny if if’s mom and dad are doing duck yao again, but as box lunch takeout, available at the artichoke co-op. today i got orange peel “chicken” with onion and brown rice, it was delicious and $5. there are also sandwiches for $3. all meals are vegan. they drop at 11:30, today was the first day and they ran out in ten minutes.

billy played his last show at gilrein’s last thursday– he was not getting paid as much as other musicians that bring in less people, and generally being treated like “a local musician”, not the world class talent that he is. anyway i think it’s a good move- shows at the ship room are cheaper and more fun and the community’s better and it’s more “traditional”. lately i’ve been hassling billy about not being traditional enough- he should do what older blues musicians did– be totally innovative musically, and create his own mythology.

sunday was the start on the street festival and i pretty cleaned up as i expected, selling the popular t-shirts. i also passed out a lot of flyers for the store and talked to a lot of people. every time kids dressed kind of punky walked by i yelled “hey, you punks!”. if they came over i gave them a flyer and told them about the store. if they didn’t look i yelled “you’re not really punks!”. i also ran into old friends from high school, which is an especial delight.

i played a last-minute show at the firehouse on friday- one of the two bands that was scheduled to play canceled, and a frantic brian called me for a favor. i didn’t have time to practice, and i really messed up a lot, it was embarrassing. everyone else knew the words except me. i’m playing again at clark this saturday, and i’m really not pumped about it. i’m trying to put together a special computer set, but i don’t really have a lot of time left. it’s not really a show– i’m going to be background music for a collaborative building thing that jean is doing. i should’ve just said no, now it’s too late. oh well. the event (in which you help build a city out of available materials) is going to be fun and it’s at the traina center, 92 downing street. the website is here.

the fashion show is this friday, at the firehouse. i don’t know what time it’s going to be at yet.

i’m spreading myself thin again/still. i’m really psyched about going to miami.

the thing with the printing thing went good (i got a three-hour job demonstrating the art of silk screening at a RISD activities fair, even though i never went to RISD, and i’m actually the sloppiest, worst silk screener anyone knows). i ate a lot of cafeteria food, fast talked a lot of art school freshman, i got paid to hang out with scott reber, cybele, j9 and mikey knives– no complaints. i mentioned scott a little the other day, so let me say now that scott is one of my favorite dudes of the moment. his most recent tour went awesome, and he has another tour coming up with lazy magnet and superior human vomit, and if you miss that, well i’ll say it: you’ve got problems with the way your life is ordered.

on the bus into providence i was delighted to sit next to corrina bain poet of pain, who i had a dream about only the night before. i told her that there was no one i’d have been more delighted to share a bus ride with, then she called me on it, and i recanted, but now i really think my initial statement was accurate. given that i had just had a dream about her, and we’ve known each other a long time, and i don’t see her very often, and i like her, i think it was very accurate. i mean, there are people i’ve never met that i’d be psyched to sit next to on a bus, but these scenarios would all come with a certain amount of stress– i’d be thinking about expanding our relationship past simple busmates into business partners or something. riding with corrina i really just had nice catching up, laughing about this and that, and calling a bummer a bummer. i guess it’s nothing to get a swell head over, but corrina, if you’re reading this, sure every day is a new dawn, but on that day (which was only a 45 minute bus ride long) it was you, i was, like i said, delighted.

more people i’ve been missing and thinking about and they contact me somehow is nicole 2heart, whose birthday is this friday and is playing a show in providence, which hopefully i’ll get to go to. also tim albro, who is so great, and an email tells me that his music, which rules, you can listen to it on the internet, on his myspace, which you can think of as being like the new mp3.com, when mp3.com was just weird demos. this is his regular webpage, which currently says “under construction” on it, as if there are things in this world that ever stop changing. tim’s on the academic side of noise, which is weird sometimes, to think about.

for previous pages see the category “comics“.

i’m in the middle of about a million things right now. today i’m getting ready to go to providence to work a weird job at RISD tomorrow– doing a silk screening demo with j9, scott reber, cybele and mikey knives. i’ve been stressing too much about it but the stressing has been positive- brainstorming what is going to be my demo image to hand out to art school freshman has resulted in a lot of inappropriate (too good) ideas, so look for those on shirts and patches in the next few weeks.

the other thing is that start on the street is this sunday, so i’ve been printing up a ton of the “paris” shirts to get ready for that. hopefully i can also move the rest of the older HBML shirts, so i can feel justified making a new design. i’m also setting up a new website to sell just the paris and turtleboy shirts, hopefully scare up some capital. plus i’m trying to rebuild the store, there’s a fashion show on the 21st, a music show on the 22nd, an art opening sometime around then, and hopefully a trip to the miami art scene with empty mountain after all of this. weird world.

last night i went to the weird fake cafe in the basement of the clarku cafeteria to see lars and mariah’s band open for a bunch of riot folk acts. it’s a move jess singer used to do which i always admired– go to the show just to see the opening band. it felt pretty right.

the first time i saw lars and mariah’s band they were called “clarisse porch cat”, and MZ was playing drums. this time they were called “the helens”, there were no drums, and the performance suffered for it, but it was still great. mariah’s a really good singer and when her and lars sing together it’s like X. also the music is really good and weird and the guitar tone is that tone i like where it’s halfway clean. mariah is 16, which is another reason i like the band– thinking about how many awesome bands she’s going to be in in the future.

like i said there were no drums, so i told them to get a drum machine, which is something i find myself telling just about every other person in my life (because of gerty farish and lazy magnet). i should really get a drum machine just to loan out to people– anybody got one they don’t use?

uh, as you probably noticed, this page (and others) have been down intermittently. we’re trying to figure it.